…or not as the case may be. Learning how to juggle family, work, friends and me time.

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break up

When a boy broke my heart in college I remember my mum came and gave me big hugs whilst I cried myself to sleep.I was on summer holidays so I moped around feeling sorry for myself for a few days, talking to friends about what a knob he was and that there were plenty more fish and the sea and that he didn’t deserve me etc etc.

15 years on and I’ve found it’s not exactly the same process.

I have to go to work each day and pretend to be fine. I have a daughter to look after, who I don’t want seeing me with tears running down my face or a sad face. I have a life to lead and luckily, in some ways, I have stuff to keep me busy so I don’t have time to dwell, but when the tears come it feels exactly the same.

A boy has broken my heart.

He hasn’t done it in the same way as any other. I don’t even think he meant to do it, but here I am sobbing with mascara down my face feeling like a 17 year old who still just wants a hug from her mum and for her to tell her everything will be ok. But really, being honest, deep down, I just want a hug from him telling me that everything will be ok. I even think he might need that type of hug too but we’re in a place where neither of us can communicate that to one another.

New relationships, when you have to deal with real, grown up life around you, are much harder than the new relationships you have at 17. The worst you have to deal with is infidelity but what else should be expected from a hormonally challenged 19 year old boy I guess.

When you’re 32 there’s baggage involved. There’s trust issues which you have waded through, there’s vulnerability issues but you let your guard down and there’s communication issues. There’s children who’d been introduced, there’s jobs to deal with, there’s family who were expecting to meet him, there’s friends you’d told everything about him, there’s history for both parties and it’s all bloody tricky to deal with.

I understand this all, yet here I am with my heart broken at 32 and it feels absolutely no different to that heart break 15 years ago.